Man In Court For Launching Several Ddos Attacks On Former Employer, Police, Courts And Others

A New Mexican man has been dragged to court for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against business competitors, public services and also the websites of his former employers.

The accused, John Kelsey Gammell, 55, who is a convicted felon that had been prohibited from possessing firearm and ammunition, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer in the US.

 Gammell admitted to launching several DDoS attacks on websites in the US between July 2015 and March 2017.

DDoS attacks carried out by Gammell were targeted at companies that he worked for before and those that refused to hire his service. Apart from those attacks mentioned above, he also targeted law enforcement websites, his business competitors, Colleges and others.


 According to the department of justice, Gammell purchased DDoS for hire service from several DDoS companies such as Inboot, Booter.xyz, CStress, VDos to launch his attacks. To make his transactions and his location untraceable, Gammell used  IP addresses to hide his address and location whenever he hired the service of those DDoS for hire sites.

 The accused used spoofed emails to transact as well as using cryptocurrency as his form of making payments. He also used encryption and drive-cleaning tools to hide digital evidence.

Victims of Gammell's cyber attack includes the Minnesota State Courts, Dakota County Technical College, Washburn Computer Group, the Hennepin County Sheriff's office, and many others.

Gammell is scheduled to face sentencing at a later date.

Man In Court For Launching Several Ddos Attacks On Former Employer, Police, Courts And Others

A New Mexican man has been dragged to court for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against business competitors, public services and also the websites of his former employers.

The accused, John Kelsey Gammell, 55, who is a convicted felon that had been prohibited from possessing firearm and ammunition, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer in the US.

 Gammell admitted to launching several DDoS attacks on websites in the US between July 2015 and March 2017.

DDoS attacks carried out by Gammell were targeted at companies that he worked for before and those that refused to hire his service. Apart from those attacks mentioned above, he also targeted law enforcement websites, his business competitors, Colleges and others.


 According to the department of justice, Gammell purchased DDoS for hire service from several DDoS companies such as Inboot, Booter.xyz, CStress, VDos to launch his attacks. To make his transactions and his location untraceable, Gammell used  IP addresses to hide his address and location whenever he hired the service of those DDoS for hire sites.

 The accused used spoofed emails to transact as well as using cryptocurrency as his form of making payments. He also used encryption and drive-cleaning tools to hide digital evidence.

Victims of Gammell's cyber attack includes the Minnesota State Courts, Dakota County Technical College, Washburn Computer Group, the Hennepin County Sheriff's office, and many others.

Gammell is scheduled to face sentencing at a later date.

Man In Court For Launching Several Ddos Attacks On Former Employer, Police, Courts And Others

A New Mexican man has been dragged to court for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against business competitors, public services and also the websites of his former employers.

The accused, John Kelsey Gammell, 55, who is a convicted felon that had been prohibited from possessing firearm and ammunition, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer in the US.

 Gammell admitted to launching several DDoS attacks on websites in the US between July 2015 and March 2017.

DDoS attacks carried out by Gammell were targeted at companies that he worked for before and those that refused to hire his service. Apart from those attacks mentioned above, he also targeted law enforcement websites, his business competitors, Colleges and others.


 According to the department of justice, Gammell purchased DDoS for hire service from several DDoS companies such as Inboot, Booter.xyz, CStress, VDos to launch his attacks. To make his transactions and his location untraceable, Gammell used  IP addresses to hide his address and location whenever he hired the service of those DDoS for hire sites.

 The accused used spoofed emails to transact as well as using cryptocurrency as his form of making payments. He also used encryption and drive-cleaning tools to hide digital evidence.

Victims of Gammell's cyber attack includes the Minnesota State Courts, Dakota County Technical College, Washburn Computer Group, the Hennepin County Sheriff's office, and many others.

Gammell is scheduled to face sentencing at a later date.

Uk Hacker Jailed For Ddos Attack That Sent Liberian Internet Offline

A London court has sentenced a 30-year-old Brit hacker to 32 months in prison for a DDoS attack against a telecom service in Liberia which resulted in the loss of tens of millions of dollars.

According to Securityweek, Daniel Kaye was hired by an employee of a rival telecom firm to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on Liberian phone and Internet service provider Lonestar.

You might be wondering what a DDoS attack is. Well, a DDoS or distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted service, server or network by flooding it with junk Internet traffic to a point where the sasaran can't accommodate the traffic and then crashes or fails.


The attack happened in 2016 when the dreaded Mirai source code was released in the Darkweb. Shortly after the release of the source code, several top websites and online services around the world went under attack, and at a stage almost half of the world Internet laid in the dark.

Also Read: The Mirai threat: How Hackers could shut off 23 Countries access to the Internet

Britain's National Crime Agency said the attack overwhelmed Lonestar's computer network and as a result knocked it out. Not only did the attack disabled Internet service across the West African country, the company also loss tens of millions dollars.

Mike Hulett of the crime agency's National Cyber Crime Unit described Kaye as "a highly skilled and capable hacker-for-hire."

Last month, Kaye pleaded to two offenses under the Computer Misuse Act and one charge possessing criminal property.

Judge Alexander Milne handed down the prison sentence on Friday at London's Blackfriars Crown Court.

Hacker Gets 10-Years Prison Sentence For Ddos Attacks On Us Health Facilities

A 34-year-old man from Somerville, Massachusetts, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for carrying out cyberattacks on two hospitals in the US.

Martin Gottesfeld, a member of the hackivist group Anonymous, was accused of launching a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the Boston Children's Hospital and the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network back in 2014.


According to Reuters, Gottesfiled carried the attacks on these organizations as part of a protest campaign on the treatment of Justina Pelletier, a teen who had been the subject of a high-profile custody battle between her parents and the state of Massachusetts. 

Pelletiers's parents and the Boston Children's Hospital were in a dispute over the diagnosis of Pelletier. The hospital believed that the Pelletier's duduk kasus were psychiatric in nature and believed her parent who wouldn't agree with the findings were interfering with her treatment. A judge later granted custody of the teen to the state and Pelletier was soon moved to Wayside Youth and Family Support network, a treatment facility within the residents.

Also Read: UK Hacker Jailed For DDoS Attack That Sent Liberian Internet Offline

The Boston hospital said the disruption of service cost it over $300,000 and as well another $300,000 in donations due to the attack which rendered its fundraising portal inaccessible.

The US authorities said the DDoS attack launched against those health facilities were powered by tens of thousand of bots. Apart from the Boston Children's Hospital and the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network which were te prime sasaran during the attack, the attack also disrupted several other medical facilities in the Longwood Medical Area.


Gottesfeld is also said to have posted a video on YouTube on behalf of the Anonymous group, urging others to launch DDoS attacks on the Boston Children's Hospital until Pelletier was released.

A few months after the attacks were carried out, Gottesfeld became a suspect and his home was searched. His devices were seized though he was not charged.

In February 2016, Gottesfeld and his wife tried to flee the US on a small boat, but returned back to the country on a Disney Cruise Ship that had rescued them off the coast of Cuba.

A federal jury in August 2018 found him guilty of  one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers and one count of damaging protected computers.

 Gottesfeld has now been sentenced to 121 months in prison, and is to pay nearly $443,000 in restitution. He however, plans to appeal the sentence, but says that he feels no remorse for his actions.

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Ubisoft Games Suffers Massive Ddos Attacks, Servers Goes Offline

France based video game publisher Ubisosft on Tuesday, July 17th 2018 suffered several series of DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) which sent several of their gaming servers offline.

A DDoS attack occurs when an attacker(s) send junk traffic from multiple systems to flood the bandwidth or resource of a targeted system so as to force it offline. The targeted system or server at the receiving end usually gets knocked out when their resource have been exhausted while trying to handle the overwhelming traffic.

Ubisoft acknowldegd the DDoS attack which knocked out several of their servers including Ghost Recon Wildlands. However, Honor and Far Cry 5 were facing connectivity issues.


A Tweet from Ubisoft's customer support Twitter handle confirmed the outage and said they were working on to mitigate the attacks.

"We're currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this," the tweet read.

We’re currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this.

— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) July 17, 2018

As of now, it is still unclear who was behind the attack or what their motive for the was. However, during the attack, concerned users kept asking questions, of which one user asked if the DDoS attack posed any risk to their personal information or if there was need for them to change their password.

In response, Ubisoft said, "We haven't had any indications that any information would be at risk." DDoS attack is the result of multiple compromised systems (botnet) which are used in flooding the victim with junk traffic.

Also Read: Teenager who hacked Donald Trump, Clinton, Obama, CIA, FBI and others gets prison sentence

The aim of a DDoS attack is to send the targeted system offline. DDoS attack do not pose any risk to users data unless the attacker has already had access to their system via another means.

A tweet from Ubisoft later in the day suggest the company was able to resolve and restore the service outage.

"Thanks for the update! This situation is now resolved, and we are continuing to monitor the situation," the tweet read.

Ubisoft Games Suffers Massive Ddos Attacks, Servers Goes Offline

France based video game publisher Ubisosft on Tuesday, July 17th 2018 suffered several series of DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) which sent several of their gaming servers offline.

A DDoS attack occurs when an attacker(s) send junk traffic from multiple systems to flood the bandwidth or resource of a targeted system so as to force it offline. The targeted system or server at the receiving end usually gets knocked out when their resource have been exhausted while trying to handle the overwhelming traffic.

Ubisoft acknowldegd the DDoS attack which knocked out several of their servers including Ghost Recon Wildlands. However, Honor and Far Cry 5 were facing connectivity issues.


A Tweet from Ubisoft's customer support Twitter handle confirmed the outage and said they were working on to mitigate the attacks.

"We're currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this," the tweet read.

We’re currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this.

— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) July 17, 2018

As of now, it is still unclear who was behind the attack or what their motive for the was. However, during the attack, concerned users kept asking questions, of which one user asked if the DDoS attack posed any risk to their personal information or if there was need for them to change their password.

In response, Ubisoft said, "We haven't had any indications that any information would be at risk." DDoS attack is the result of multiple compromised systems (botnet) which are used in flooding the victim with junk traffic.

Also Read: Teenager who hacked Donald Trump, Clinton, Obama, CIA, FBI and others gets prison sentence

The aim of a DDoS attack is to send the targeted system offline. DDoS attack do not pose any risk to users data unless the attacker has already had access to their system via another means.

A tweet from Ubisoft later in the day suggest the company was able to resolve and restore the service outage.

"Thanks for the update! This situation is now resolved, and we are continuing to monitor the situation," the tweet read.

Man Faces Up To 10-Years Jail Term For Ddos Attacks Against Gaming Company

A 23-year-old man, Austin Thompson, from Utah has pleaded guilty to launching series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) of service attacks against several online gaming companies and servers between 2013 and 2014.

According to a press release by the US Justice Department, Thompson flooded his victim's servers with heavy traffic to take them offline. These junk traffic were directed at online gaming companies and servers including those of Sony Online Entertainment.

After launching these attacks, Thompson would go on Twitter using @DerpTrolling to post screenshots of his victims server that he had downed after the attack. Often, these downed servers would stay offline for hours, incurring heavy business damage to the owners.


"In today's world. cyber crime is an immune threat that affects private, commercial, and government sectors alike," said FBI Special Agent in Charge John Brown. "The FBI's capacity to respond to cyber incidents is enhanced through collaboration with affected industries and partnership in the community to prevent and combat these threats. Together, we will thwart these cyber criminals who sasaran our communities business and infrastructure."

 According to the US Justice Department, Thompson has pleaded guilty to causing damage that exceeds $95,000 to a protected, which he now face up to 10 years of prison sentence, a fine of $250,000, and 3 years of supervised release.

Also Read: Satanic Temple Sues Netflix For $50M Over Use Of Baphomet Deity In Sabrina

Kaspersky Lab notes that the global cost of a data breach for enterprises has risen from 11 percent in 2017. In the US alone, the average cost of a cyber attack for enterprises has grown from $1.2 million in 2016 to $1.3 million in 2017.

"Denial-of-service attacks cost millions of dollars annually,' said US Attorney Adam Braverman. "We are committed to finding and prosecuting those who disrupt businesses, often for nothing more than ego."

The sentencing is scheduled for March 1, 2019 and will be carried out by United States District Judge Jeffrey Miller.